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2.2 Sal, I Am Your Father
It was with some mild confusion that the party found its way to Amalgama using the Night Pool. The map they had that hinted at the location of the next Ascendant was a little unclear about where they should be looking, but it seemed undoubted that it was in Amalgama somewhere. It was, apparently, the worst map ever. More akin to a riddle than a map, really. So the party chose as its destination a halfling trading post, figuring that it would be a good place to gather information from both The Collective and the traders. The party agreed to speak with the leader of the trading post who they suspected would have the most available information to work with out of the traders. Travize took the time to greet some members of The Collective in person, seeing as his mental block prevented him from dealing with them mentally. The party attempted some awkward introductions as well. Bagel tried to mimic Travize's introduction and earned himself a kiss, the old dog! Sal was less lucky, and quite disappointed about it. A spring in Bagel's stride, the party found their way to the trading post's leader. He proved to be a very informed halfling. Informed, that is, in all the arts of irritation and self interested ass-hattery. He pronounced each word with such irritating bellicosity and snobbishness that most of the party wanted to punch him in less than thirty seconds. He declined to provide any information about anything at all without being paid healthily for his services. The party doubted highly that he even knew anything worth finding out and was about to leave when he claimed to know secrets about the Collective unknown to the Collective itself. Something about the suggestion struck Travize as believable enough to consider trading for the information. He wanted something special, though. Either the Skein of Soul-sight or a chance to sleep with Sajaina. The party looked at each other for a few minutes, discussing, and Sajaina eventually agreed grudgingly to a distasteful suggestion from Travize that the party go along with the second proposition, then simply have Sajaina sneak out. It's not as though he could hold her against her will, or even keep track of her if she decided she didn't want to be found. The man laughed delightedly and gave up the information he promised. Apparently, he claimed, someone had figured out how to prevent members of the collective from sending information to each other. They had used this trick to commit some kind of massacre, he said, without any member of the Collective knowing. This seemed pretty absurd, but worth investigating. Then the little halfling jerk had Sajaina dragged off and put a collar around her neck. This was not what the party had expected and threw everyone for a bit of a loop. While they were stillprocessing their outrage and figuring out if they needed to break in and free Sajaina from the super-jerk halfling, Sajaina began talking to Sal through the telepathic bond he had cast on her earlier in the day. Not only had the halfling elected to imprison Sajaina, he was also keeping a number of slaves, all chained and forced to work. Now there was no room for debating subtleties or the use of force. The party would not wait for Sajaina to sneak out. They geared up to break in, and quite possibly murder the halfling, while Travize mentioned the slaves to The Collective. Suddenly, every member of The Collective within half a mile turned, all at once, to face the trading post. Collective-bound birds began circling overhead as they gathered before the central building's doors. A small swarm of rats ran beneath the doors and through windows to investigate the interior of the building. They found the slaves, and the communal mind began to buzz with tactics and strategy. Those present grabbed farmer's tools and spare beams of wood to hand and, as one body, they marched upon the trading post as inexorably as a tide. Coordinating perfectly, the Collective apprehended the trading post master, disarmed the guards, disabled those who decided to fight instead of surrender, freed the slaves, and shuffled them all out of the trading post. It was over in five minutes. No casualties. Preparations were made to care for the former slaves. Food and other supplies were quickly brought and lodgings established to house them for the time being. The halfling boss was transported across the river for interrogation, as well as to face accusations of crimes against mortal kind before a council of the Communal Mind. The Collective, in case you couldn't tell, really dislikes the idea of slavery. With that crisis over, the Collective joined the party in investigating the rumors of massacre to the south. They sent birds ahead to gauge the situation. Travize's friend, Lyra, joined the party in walking towards the scene. This quickly became a run when the birds began returning mental images of blood and bodies. It seems that rumors of someone being able to prevent the Collective from communicating were less exaggerated than first thought. A small town full of corpses greeted them as they approached. People lay dead, bodies brutalized by fists and tools. Every single one was a member of The Collective. A cry of grief and horror filled the communal mind as more and more people approached the grim scene. The party quickly moved to investigate, a circle of Amalgamans rapidly closing around the settlement. People rushed to and fro, examining and searching. Thinking and analyzing. Weeping. It took some time to put together facts, but soon members of The Collective began joining themselves together to form a joint mind for the sake of processing data and lines of reasoning. Facts were also assembled by the party, particularly Baygrith who took the chance to demonstrate his analytic skills. Only members of The Collective were among the bodies. The people appeared to have been attacking each other with whatever happened to be on hand. As far as can be noted, the town was 'oddly quiet' for a few days leading up to the massacre. The bodies were not marked by anything resembling a trained military strike. No footprints marred the earth that could not be accounted for by the standard comings and goings of the town, save one set that appeared to lead away from town and somewhat more recently than any other set of prints. The bodies were about a day old. There was an air of magic around the town, though too vague to determine much. Several people in the town defended themselves with magic, though it was determined that the magic employed was consistent with quick, undisciplined strikes that cannot ordinarily be used except in absolute desperation, thus ruling out mind control. The last person to die, it was determined, committed suicide. One person who ought to have been in the town was not among the bodies discovered. Kal was his name, and he seems to have survived. Kal is unaccounted for and not responding to the call of The Collective. A great deal of effort is currently being poured into uncovering what could cause so many people who regarded each other as brothers and sisters to turn so readily against one another, and how such pain could not have reached the rest of The Collective. As investigations continued and bodies were prepared for burial, a nation grieved its loss. Sal was asked for a song and was joined by many voices, including Travize, all crying out their pain. Some joked. Some simply held themselves together in tight, shaking balls of pain. A community shared its solace and reassurances, acting together to ease pains and say goodbye to the departed. But there is seldom rest for our party, which had come with a dire and time-sensitive mission to find the next Ascendant quickly enough to surprise Murag and rescue Elizabel. The Collective put together riddle of the map quickly, declaring the likely location of the next Ascendant to be atop Daneel's Peak. This was somewhat vexing, since people visit Daneel's Peak nearly every day, and none have reported anything particularly out of the ordinary. The party elected to try its hand at this new puzzle, riding out over the lush and life-filled landscape, across the River of Souls, and to the base of Daneel's Peak. They were joined by more of Travize's close friends, including Dal'evrin, Pelorat, and Malen. Together they climbed to the summit of Daneel's Peak and looked around for signs or secrets. The barely visible shadow of something was found, more of a small distortion in the light than any actual interference. A tower, virtually invisible and completely intangible, rested upon the summit of the mountain. A message in the language of the ancient humans was written in the shadows cast at midday. The Circle of Historians gladly supplied the translation, which read “To be in my tower you must have entered it yesterday.” Timmeron tried quite a bit of time-magic while the rest of the party snooped about looking for clues. To no avail, unfortunately. But then Dal'evrin spoke up about a rumor some people remembered. A poem, it was said, could make the mountain dance. Gods and spirits knew which one, of course. But before they could devolve into trying every poem remembered by the various Circles, they elected to try a somewhat famous poem written by the founder of Amalgama, Daneel. It was his mountain, after all. So Dal'evrin read aloud Daneel's Seduction Through Outrage which reacted with the Key, causing the top of the mountain to twist and rotate. Apparently this moved the hidden structure out of whatever effect kept it intangible, causing a great, marble tower to manifest. A hundred members of The Collective wanted to follow the party in, but some trick of time magic kept away any not already bound to an Ascendant. The tower itself was an incredibly posh affair, decorated with fine furniture and old paintings. The rooms were huge, sweeping things with balconies and artistic leanings of the far gone centuries. The tower of an Ascendant to be sure, given the old world taste. But a single set of muddy footprints marred the pale carpet. Fuck. The party raced to follow the footprints down hallways, through doors and up stairs, passing along the way a picture of a young man bearing an astonishing resemblance to Sal. Eventually coming to a door, odd things began happening. Candles would flicker out and then light themselves again. Books would topple over and then re-right themselves. An image of Murag was trying to force the door, but quickly vanished. Sajaina rushed to open the door with her magical key. A war of magics waged itself within the lock, but eventually the door disintegrated, revealing an exact copy of the same room on the other side. The party watched as another image of Murag tried to force its way through the door they had just opened. Albert appeared behind him, conjuring up the same instrument he had used to force open the door to the Ascendant the party had watched him acquire. The beam he fired set off the security system instead of opening the door and Murag fled, but not before damage was done to the walls, setting loose a flickering stream of magic into the room. The party continued on, hoping that Murag had simply given up and no vision they later saw would show him ahead of them. But they soon found themselves in a bizarre room entirely full of a grassy field, with no doors or windows. But it reacted to their presence, taking a new shape to mirror a memory from the past of each person present. But each was missing a key element, which the party had to fill in with their own memories and cleverness before the room would shift to the next memory. Baygrith found himself as an infant in his old house, filling in a missing void with his memory of his parents. Travize completed the memory of his first shape-shift, into a turtle, of course. But then things got weird. Sal found his childhood, and ''very halfling,''self standing in a room, about to be crushed under the weight of a falling log torn loose from his home. It was Bagel who completed this memory with the image of a mass-murderer he'd heard reports of. The man stood at the center of the town, destructive magic radiating out from him. The party watched as the town was annihilated. There was no way baby Sal could have survived. It was Travize who had to complete Timmeron's memory of the time he lost his arm attempting a dark magic ritual. There was a man standing behind Timmeron as his ritual backfired and the memory was receptive to an image of Steave who stood behind Timmeron and gripped his shoulders as the spell went awry. Then there was Sajaina, who saw the night of her conception. This was made somewhat odd by the fact that, as it turns out, the Maharaja was NOT the one having sex with her mother. It was his chief adviser and rumored brother (making sense of the Astor prophet's earlier description of Sajaina as the Maharaja's niece), acting as the Maharaja himself stood by, looking worried and utterly, um, uninterested in women. The lights were off, apparently to hide the fact that Mura'kesz's ruler was not, in fact, the one doing his job. The final memory was the battle that preceded the ascension of the Tower of Apotheosis into the sky, and this vision proved to be quite real, as far as danger goes. The party had to dash its way through a slew of complicated situations, virtually all of which with deleterious consequences for failure. Baygrith was hit by a cannonball and immediately reduced to a red stain on the floor. Sajaina and Travize were burned to death my mages wielding fire spells. Bagel was swallowed up by a tidal wave of racing lava. Sal was stabbed by a rushing battalion of soldiers. It just so happens that each party member also died a number of other unsightly ways as well. But there was a thread of time that any could pull to reset the memory, which they used with desperate intensity until they were able to find their way through the battle, all in more or less one piece. But the conclusion of the memory held its own surprise. It was not Bagel's memory they saw, but Wryn's. She sat atop the tower beside another mage, and together they cast a spell that slaughtered all of the attacking forces at once, casting a river of blood into the sky as part of some grand ritual to attack the gods themselves. And even as the bodies feel to the floor, Wryn seemed to be excited about it. Spirit Wryn- our Wryn- was horrified and retreated into herself for a time. She did not want to be whoever this memory of her was. The party was, needless to say, horrified as well. The completion of the memory allowed them to leave the room, and they continued on to explore the vast premises of the tower. Time behaved oddly throughout, with events replaying themselves every few seconds or windows leading out into landscapes from long ago. But eventually the party met Dal McLauren, the next Ascendant. Sajaina could not get into the room as she had not accepted the Night Maiden's ritual of blood and so remained unbound to this Ascendant. She herself is pretty sure she doesn't want to be bound to another Ascendant anyway. His name is Dal. He is a kind, worried pacifist who hates violence. His brother, adopted, is Finean McLauren, the mind control expert whom the party banished to some horrid place of nightmare. He is also the one who wrote the equations and magical theories upon which The Collective was based when Daneel stumbled upon them so long ago. Dal was delighted to learn that his work had been used to produce such a positive thing and is desperate to join if he can. We're still working on that and it is unclear if it will be possible. After a long discussion, half of which involved breaking the bad news to Dal that he had been imprisoned against his will for over a thousand years, the party bound him in Travize's necklace of river stone, allowing him to take physical form. They reentered the tower to do this, hidden away within the folds of time so as to hide the binding from Albert. But one more surprise awaited the party. Dal is Sal's father. A thousand years ago, or so, Dal had fallen in love with a halfling girl. Humans and halflings can't have children, but she wanted one so badly. So she approached Thain, the Ascendant master of biology, and through his tinkering, became pregnant anyway. She carried the child to full term and gave birth to a healthy, halfling child. Dal loved the child dearly and wove about the baby Sal and his lady love a spell to protect them should anything terrible happen. But then tragedy struck. The tower mages came for the Ascendants, locking them away. Dal was convinced that they might hurt his wife and child to get to him, so he used his magic to cast them forward in time. It was only supposed to be a few days- long enough for the danger to pass. But this was not meant to be. Between the time magic and the protection spell Dal had cast, and the destruction posed by the mass murderer that blew up infant Sal's home, the spell cast them forward quite a bit more than that. We do not know if Sal's mother still lives, or where she would be if she does. Dal is a dabbler in many arts, most notably Golemancy and social magics that predict the actions and hearts of people. He also claims to only dabble in time-magic, but as a natural-born genius his 'dabbling' is more like expertise. Category:Quests